


changelings

by kittenscully



Series: fictober 2020 [8]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Bisexual Dana Scully, Bisexual Fox Mulder, Friendship, Multi, Season/Series 03, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-08
Updated: 2020-10-08
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:20:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26900536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittenscully/pseuds/kittenscully
Summary: He’s looking at her curiously again, and she wishes, not for the first time, that she didn’t have to will herself to bravery in order to talk about this.[fictober day 8]
Relationships: Dana Scully/Original Female Character(s), Fox Mulder/Dana Scully, Fox Mulder/Original Male Character(s)
Series: fictober 2020 [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1949467
Comments: 4
Kudos: 59





	changelings

**Author's Note:**

  * For [astrolosts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/astrolosts/gifts).



> Prompt: "And neither should you."

They’re out for beers, hundreds of miles from anyone that knows them, and maybe that’s why Scully’s feeling reckless. 

There’s loud music, with the dense dive bar noise humming underneath, alcohol sweat sharp like sex from the shadows. It makes her feel nineteen again, back when she’d fancied herself dangerous and wild. Conjures memories of leaning against a counter with soft lips pressed to her throat. 

Gaze traveling the well-trodden path down to Mulder’s mouth, she wonders, shifts on her stool just a little. When he turns to look at her, her eyes snap back up to his, finding a matching curiosity. 

There’s a long moment where they hold there, and she gets the familiar sense that they’re both just waiting for the other to make the first move. 

But no, not tonight. She backs away from the tension, leaving it alone for now. After all, she’s already decided to pay for all of their drinks, and that’s enough of a gesture. If Mulder tries to argue, she’ll just ignore him. She’s had plenty of practice with that. 

Hoping to dispel the heat that’s been building between them, she casts her gaze around the room like a fishing lure. 

There, across the bar. Someone’s watching them. Taller than Mulder, she thinks, and bulkier. She’d call his gaze predatory, except that it doesn’t feel threatening or dangerous in the slightest. Taking another sip of her beer to fuel the bubbly warmth in her stomach, she tries to catch his eye, just to see what’ll happen.

Quickly, she realizes that something’s off. Namely, that he doesn’t seem to have noticed her at all. 

She glances at Mulder, and lifts her eyebrows. 

“You’ve got an admirer,” she tells him, jabbing his arm with her elbow and jerking her head towards the large man.

“I noticed,” he chuckles. Pushing up his sleeves, he scratches restlessly at the wood of the bar. 

“No interest?” she teases, half expecting an explosive reaction. 

“Not at this time,” he says, grinning lazily. 

Scully narrows her eyes, surveys him carefully, finding his body language defensive despite his apparent comfort. Hunched shoulders, and shifty eyes that keep wanting to look where she’s indicated, but refuse to make the rest of the journey. Interesting.

She thinks, briefly, of Alex Krycek and his obvious advances, and amends her evaluation. Interesting, but not entirely unexpected.

The memory of her undergrad years nudges at her again, blonde curls and a smile like freefalling. Her own small hands mapping a canvas of pretty, sun freckled skin in headstrong, sacrilegious reverence. The pervasive, thrilling feeling of exploring a strange world, as of yet uncharted, and the lurking worry that she might lose herself at any moment. 

It’s been over a decade now, but the painful, guilty heartache still lingers. _Here be monsters._

Mulder is visibly uncomfortable, and as she observes the distance in his eyes, she thinks that he, too, might be lost in memories. 

“You know, Mulder,” she says, struck with the urge to reach out. “I haven’t always been as boring as I am now.”

“You’re not boring,” he says immediately.

“I’m not exactly adventurous.”

“This coming from the woman who broke into a government facility to find top secret alien DNA.”

“In my personal life,” she concedes, allowing him a smile. 

He’s looking at her curiously again, and she wishes, not for the first time, that she didn’t have to will herself to bravery in order to talk about this. Missy had been brave without even trying. Charlie had been a coward, running at the first sign of their parents’ inevitable disapproval. 

Finishing off her beer in an attempt to bolster her nerves, Scully places herself somewhere between the two. Able to break the silence if she tries, but too easily startled to avoid choosing flight over fight. 

“When I was at the University of Maryland,” she begins. “I found myself making… unconventional romantic connections.”

“Unconventional,” he repeats. His fingers are scraping over the counter again, and he hasn’t taken his eyes off of her. 

She’s certain that he knows what she means. But Juliet had tried to make her say it too, and in hindsight, her refusal was what had doomed them from the start. 

Scully thinks again of Missy, what she would’ve done. She waves the bartender over, leaving Mulder’s prompt to fester until she’s got another beer in her hand. And then she lifts the bottle, silently toasting her sister’s memory for courage. 

_If you’re watching, Missy, please be proud of me._

“I had a girlfriend,” she says, finally, finally. Twelve years too late. 

It doesn’t feel as hard to say, in hindsight. But at nineteen, barely a year out of her mother’s constant, watchful gaze, it had seemed insurmountable. And even now, she’s wound up tight as a clock, barely resisting the urge to check behind her for unwanted listeners. 

Mulder doesn’t look surprised, but his eyes do soften with what seems like recognition, leaving them warmer than usual.

“She was nothing like my other exes,” she says. 

“Another student, then?” He asks, a cheap but not unsuccessful attempt at lightening the mood. 

She nods, feeling her muscles begin to relax. “The same year as me.”

“A blonde,” Mulder says. It should be a question, but he sounds utterly sure of the fact, and she blinks in surprise.

“How did you know?”

“Had my suspicions.” He shrugs, not quite looking at her.

Not for the first time, she suspects him of observing her like he would paranormal phenomena, keeping a record of her likes and dislikes, what catches her attention. With the low level buzz of tipsiness blurring the edges of her consciousness, it’s easy to admit to herself that she actually rather likes the idea. 

“Tell me about her,” he says. 

“She was in the natural sciences,” Scully recalls. Every detail remains intact to this day, preserved in perfect condition. A diorama of a love driven to extinction, just waiting to be wandered through like a memorial. “Wanted to be a marine biologist.”

“You like the smart ones,” Mulder comments. 

He isn’t wrong, but it’s more than that. 

“It was her fascination with an unexplored world that had me hooked,” she says. “The vastness, the otherness of what she wanted to learn. She always used to say that there were stranger things lurking in the depths than there could ever be out there in far-off galaxies.” 

At that, Mulder looks intrigued, just like she’d thought he might. 

“She was tall, didn’t wear makeup. She dressed like a hippie, if hippies shopped at vintage stores.” 

Juliet hadn’t worn bras, either. She’d abhorred the impracticality of heels, and so Scully had explored the strange new world presented by the girl herself in battered converse and combat boots, pushing up on her toes to kiss Juliet’s beeswax chapstick off. 

Scully hasn’t told anyone about her in a very, very long time. But it’s felt wrong for awhile now, to go on with the awareness that no one still living knows, other than the two of them. 

What they’d had, her and Juliet, deserves to be remembered. Immortalized somehow, by a third party, for posterity. Stored in more places than just a few old polaroids in the shoebox under her bed. 

And she’s certain that Missy would approve of her choice of substitute confidant. 

“She was so ceaselessly smart, Mulder,” Scully exhales. “And stubborn. You couldn’t pin her down, couldn’t back her into a corner. If she got an idea into her head, there was no stopping her.”

The way he’s looking at her now is different, strangely thoughtful. She realizes, very suddenly, that she could easily be describing him. 

“What happened?” He asks, instead of acknowledging that particular fact.

“I wasn’t brave enough,” she admits, rubs her forehead with the heel of her hand. “I was barely nineteen. I stopped going to church after she made me realize some of the problems with the religion I was raised in, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell my family.”

Mulder nods, and she carries on before his expression has a chance to turn to pity. It would be too close to sympathy, and that isn’t something she’s worthy of.

“She was serious about us,” Scully says, her voice going quieter. “I was too, but it wasn’t enough. Not then.”

“Do you think it would be now?” His face remains neutral, curious but reserved.

“I don’t know,” she says, surprising herself with her own honesty. She can’t help but think of Charlie’s estrangement, how easily that could’ve been her instead. “Letting her down is one of my biggest regrets, but I don’t think I could deal with the consequences.”

“What was her name?”

“Juliet,” Scully says. There’s a thickness in her throat that warns of impending tears. “Her name was Juliet, and I think I may have broken her heart.”

“Juliet,” Mulder repeats. She gets the sense that he’s committing it to memory, paired with the image she’s painted. “You loved her.”

No judgement, no presumptions. Just an observation. 

Biting her lip, Scully finds herself nodding, eyelashes fluttering in an attempt to ward off the wave of emotion. She doesn’t tell him that Juliet was her first love, or the best of nearly all of them so far. She doesn’t tell him that she still loves her, in the distant sort of way. The way that you love something so long lost, you can’t be sure it even existed in the first place.

“You would’ve liked her,” she says, instead, and Mulder smiles. 

He leans closer, then, arms braced on the counter, as if he’s got something vitally important to tell her. She feels a surge of affection, as she sees the sincerity in his furrowed brow.

“You shouldn’t have to feel scared,” he says. “To talk about this, I mean.”

It’s so naive that she almost wants to laugh. But he’s right, despite his idealism. Even if he is verging on hypocrisy.

“And neither should you,” she tells him, bluntly. Watches his posture stiffen, caught out.

There’s a moment of silence, and Scully clinks her beer bottle lightly against his, gives him an encouraging nod. She won’t make him talk about it if he doesn’t want to, and she isn’t about to ask. But she’s open to listening.

“Mine was named Peter,” he says, decisively. “It was my first year at Oxford. He was Irish, if you’d believe that.”

He lets out a chuckle, and then his shoulders sink a little, as if in resignation, as he stares at his two hands, wrapped around his bottle. 

“It wasn’t…” 

Scully tilts her head, and he sighs, shaking his head. 

“It wasn’t a real relationship, not like you’re talking about,” he says finally. “Just a fling, I guess. Started with a late night rendezvous in the bathroom of a bar a lot like this, and turned into a few other meetings that you couldn’t really call dates.” 

Without even particularly trying, Scully finds herself imagining it. Angry British punk music on the speakers, pervasive even past the plywood door of the single-stalled, closet-like room. Heat, sweat, and drunken recklessness. 

“He wasn’t like my admirer tonight,” Mulder says. “He was… I guess you could call him pretty, more than anything else. Almost unearthly. I used to think he looked like a changeling, but that’s probably just my tendency to dramatize.” He laughs, rather humorlessly. “And the fact that my Irish folklore kick happened around the same time.”

She smiles, just a little. The idea of Mulder at eighteen, lodged in in the corner of an old library, reading about folklore and daydreaming of a beautiful boy, is somehow unimaginably sweet. 

“It sounds romantic, I know,” he says, shaking his head. “But the fae weren’t exactly benevolent figures, Scully. They didn’t have human emotions, and they were feared, more than anything else.” 

“Were you afraid of Peter?” she asks, prickling with defensiveness at the thought. 

“Not any more than he was afraid of me,” Mulder shrugs. And there’s his thumbnail again, scratching at the wood. “But I didn’t understand my feelings, or what they meant.”

 _Oh._ That, she understands.

“It was a whole other world, Scully,” he sighs. “And I just didn’t think of myself as part of it. That was the part that freaked me out. The idea that I could only meet him in the margins between here and there.” 

“What happened?” She’s tentative about asking, but it only seems fair.

“To be honest, I couldn’t tell you,” he says. “We saw each other a few times, and then we didn’t anymore. And then, well… I met Phoebe. And you know most of that story already.”

Scully nods. She does, and she thinks of it often still, just to feel the inkling of burgeoning rage on Mulder’s behalf. A reminder that she can still feel something deeply other than guilt.

“I wish I’d known him better,” Mulder admits. “I couldn’t tell you if you’d like him.”

“Did you?”

“Yes,” he says, without a bit of hesitation. “I liked him a lot.”

“Was he good to you?” This, as far as she’s concerned, is the really important question.

Mulder thinks on it for a moment, and it tugs at her, the way that he isn’t sure. He hasn’t been treated well by many people, and she knows that, but the reminders always catch her off guard. 

“I think he was,” he says, finally. “As much as he could be, in the little time that we had.”

“Then I would’ve liked him,” Scully says, with a brisk nod. 

When he rewards her with a grin, it warms her, right in the pit of her stomach. The spot where fear lives, she thinks, but maybe not anymore. 

“To Peter,” she pronounces, lifting her beer, the toast spoken out loud this time. 

“And Juliet,” he says. “And to us, of course.”

 _And to Missy, and Charlie_ , she adds, in the back of her mind. 

“May we live to see the day when that other world is the same as this one.”

She wants to tease him for his poetics, but the moment seems wrong for mockery. So she taps his bottle with hers instead, gives him a hesitant smile. 

“And may it be soon,” she says.

As they drink, his shoulder bumps against hers. And Scully thinks of them, like she often does, as brothers in arms, twin explorers scoping out an uncertain new land. Sharing a camaraderie rooted deep in their bones, visible but impenetrable to any observer who might watch them from afar. 

**Author's Note:**

> As well as being part of my fictober list, this is a response to a prompt my friend Iz gave me a long time ago, which was for a conversation where Mulder and Scully come out to each other, before being together. So this one is for her – I hope you like it, love.


End file.
